Sunday, April 30, 2017

Using the Excel Sunburst Chart for Visualizations

Though not a new concept, Office 365 (Excel 2016) has a Sunburst Chart type (a.k.a. Multi-level Pie or Donut Chart) that is very handy for presenting hierarchies. Here are some ideas to consider:

A series of project portfolios:

A phone "wheel" like a phone tree (recently used this idea myself):

And I will credit the idea (thank you Chris Baugh) to an application at work representing questions on an assessment and how they relate to Common Core:

There is more sophisticated color formatting available in a variety of JavaScript libraries such as FusionCharts and HighCharts, but having the chart type in Excel makes it very approachable for those wanting an ad hoc visualization that doesn't require any programming.